4 ms·

It's a neologism, or possibly the resurrection of a long unused form - I don't know exactly how we came about it but I agree completely that one of the meanings

It's a neologism, or possibly the resurrection of a long unused form - I don't know exactly how we came about it but I agree completely that one of the meanings of "lesson" is "a thing which has been learned". In my experience, there's a tendency toward folksiness in certain varieties of corpspeak that causes rejection of "formal-sounding" terms and repurposing of "plainer" forms to create new words, hence lessons = learnings, protégé = mentee, and so on.

jameshart 5y ago
I don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. Do you also dislike the word 'teachings'?
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  I don't think the fact that some words can be formed that way is a good guide to whether other formations are words or not. Do you think "cookings" is a word? It would be "things that have been cooked" I suppose, on that basis. I would say if it's a word it's one I've never heard before. On the other hand, "cuttings" is clearly a word in common usage in horticulture.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    My point is more that it sits in roughly the same semantic space as ‘lessons’ and ‘learnings’, yet there seems to be room for nuanced differences of meaning. Yet I don’t see people object to ‘teachings’ on the basis that we already have the word ‘lessons’.
- munificent 5y ago
  > I don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. It bugs me because it emerged out of tech executive culture and caught on in large part because others used it as an aspirational signal to sound like they are members of that group.
- blackshaw 5y ago
  I don't really care, but since you asked: "learnings" grates my ears because it sounds wrong. I never used to hear people say it, and as GP points out, we already had the perfectly good word "lessons". "Learnings" to me sounds like a mistake a non-native English speaker would make, perhaps by incorrectly extrapolating from the word "teachings". It's a forgivable mistake, but I don't see why we need to adopt it into the native vernacular. (Yeah, yeah, I know, language evolves, prescriptive versus descriptive etc.. In a world where "literally" no longer means literally, I'm not going to waste much time getting angry about "learnings".)

jameshart 5y ago

I don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. Do you also dislike the word 'teachings'?

NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
I don't think the fact that some words can be formed that way is a good guide to whether other formations are words or not. Do you think "cookings" is a word? It would be "things that have been cooked" I suppose, on that basis. I would say if it's a word it's one I've never heard before. On the other hand, "cuttings" is clearly a word in common usage in horticulture.
- jameshart 5y ago
  My point is more that it sits in roughly the same semantic space as ‘lessons’ and ‘learnings’, yet there seems to be room for nuanced differences of meaning. Yet I don’t see people object to ‘teachings’ on the basis that we already have the word ‘lessons’.
munificent 5y ago
> I don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. It bugs me because it emerged out of tech executive culture and caught on in large part because others used it as an aspirational signal to sound like they are members of that group.
blackshaw 5y ago
I don't really care, but since you asked: "learnings" grates my ears because it sounds wrong. I never used to hear people say it, and as GP points out, we already had the perfectly good word "lessons". "Learnings" to me sounds like a mistake a non-native English speaker would make, perhaps by incorrectly extrapolating from the word "teachings". It's a forgivable mistake, but I don't see why we need to adopt it into the native vernacular. (Yeah, yeah, I know, language evolves, prescriptive versus descriptive etc.. In a world where "literally" no longer means literally, I'm not going to waste much time getting angry about "learnings".)